Basket Case (1982) - Comedy Horror Film Review

A fair while ago, before I even started doing this blog well over a decade ago, I got a DVD boxset of the Frank Henenlotter (Frankenhooker) written and directed Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3. While I enjoyed them, I always wondered what the first entry in the series was like. This was before I had the internet easily accessible and so I had to try and work out what had happened myself rather than be able to read any kind of plot guide. With Basket Case both getting a 4K UHD Blu-ray release, and streaming in 4K on ARROW, the streaming subscription service for the first time ever, I jumped at the chance to finally have a decent excuse to check out this classic comedy horror.
Apologies for the state of this review, I first wrote it on a notepad earlier today during my lunch break at work, and due to having to go back to my day job, I had to rush it a bit.

Duane Bradley (Kevin VanHentenryck - the Basket Case series) is a young man with a mission that has taken him to New York. He hides within a wicker basket that he carries with him everywhere a terrible secret. As a child he was born with a conjoined twin attached to his side. This heavily deformed twin that came to be named Belial, exists only as an oversized head with two short arms attached to it. Separated in a procedure that Duane was given no choice in, Belial was believed dead, but unknown to the doctors, Duane rescued him and has looked after him ever since. Now Duane has headed to New York at the behest of Belial, in order for them both to be able to get bloody revenge on the people who separated them from each other. While in the city however, Duane befriends a receptionist he meets, a development that doesn't sit well with the possessive Belial.

Described as a comedy horror, Basket Case is a classic horror movie that certainly appeared better than what my memories of the sequels were. The relationship between the two bizarre brothers is at the hear of the movie, and for a mostly static puppet there is a surprisingly good report between the two. Despite Duane appearing relatively normal (outside of a huge scar on his side), he has an obvious lack of social skills, and to many it appears his innocence of how to operate in the city will be his downfall. Belial is always around though, and despite not being able to talk out of guttural screams, he has a psychic connection to his brother that allows him to communicate silently with him. This ability isn't reciprocated though, and so Duane's constant one sided arguments with his brother leads to plenty of amusing chaotic scenes.
The story is split mainly between the madcap goings on at the seedy hotel the pair are staying in (full of a large collection of eccentric characters, with Robert Vogel as the hotel manager being my favourite), Duane's growing relationship with the receptionist Sharon (Terri Susan Smith), and the more horror based crazy kill scenes.

As far as Belial goes, while he never looked amazing, he had a lot of charm to him. He appears as a puppet, with just his eyes and mouth moving. He is occasionally shown moving around on his own, with jerky stop-motion effects used to display this, but more often than not he is in the arms of other characters, whether it is his victims who are spinning around the room as he is apparently attacking them, or Duane himself carrying him around. These moments of attacking people never looked realistic at all, but leads to plenty of great looking claw wounds and lots of blood, due to Belial being very strong with his sharp teeth and claws. Some of these kills looked great, such as a couple of victims who are sliced in half, and one poor soul whose face is shoved into a drawer full of sharp scalpels!

There were moments of comedy, but other than the look of Belial and the scenes involving him, this did feel more like a horror than a comedy horror for the most part. While there were some laugh out loud moments (including a particularly painful looking testicle lift!), the seedy look of early eighties New York was represented well, with run down hotels, drug dealers, sex shops and hookers. The story was pretty simple, but I thought the film had a good pace to it. It even saw fit to include a five minute or so flashback sequence that took place back when Duane was twelve in the middle of the movie. That made for a lovely little diversion. Special mention goes to the wonderful soundtrack, it really added a lot, especially in the finale.

I really enjoyed Basket Case, it felt like a stone cold cult classic that had a really unique feel and style to it. Full of interesting characters and fun ideas, this was a real blast from beginning to end. Basket Case will be available on 4K UHD Blu-ray and streaming in 4K on ARROW from 30th April.

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Death Screams (1982) - Horror Film Review

It has only been in the past couple of years that I started to tap into slasher films of the 1980s, and I am so glad that I did. Maybe it is because I am getting older but I have such a bitter sweet pang of nostalgia for decades gone past. Death Screams is a relatively obscure slasher from 1982 (the year of my birth). Directed by David Nelson, with a story written by Paul C. Elliott, this poorly paced horror isn't great by any stretch of the imagination. Watching this in modern day however I found it to be endlessly enjoyable, its many problems are part of the charm in my opinion.

The locals of a small town are enjoying the last day of a carnival. Among those in attendance are a group of teenage friends, including new couple Bob (Curt Rector) and Kathy (Andria Savio - Death Chase), Sandy (Jody Kay), jokester Diddle (John Kohler), promiscuous Ramona (Jennifer Chase) and their leader, Tom (Josh Gamble). Unknown to everyone in town there is a maniac on the loose, who is slowly racking up a sizeable body count. With the teens going out to the river for the party, their night of fun gets cut short by the machete wielding psycho.

Death Screams starts off both well and weird by having a double murder as its prologue. I say weird as the couple are killed in a hard to decipher way at the same moment a railway train steams past. Their corpses are thrown into the river, as the bodies sink in slow motion, the intro credit sequence plays out. Going from this I expected lots of deaths but it is in fact thirty eight minutes later before the next victim meets their end. There is a strange pacing issue that plagued the movie all the way up to the end. You would expect the third act to be more bloody and action packed than what had come before, and you would be right. However, it almost felt like the filmmakers ran out of time, the kills increase hugely in frequency, and the reveal and defeat of the antagonist happens within minutes. Amusingly when one of the survivors questions why the killer did what they did, they are met with a simple "I don't know" before it cuts to end credits. It felt like the people making the film also had no idea what the motivations of the killer were. I admit it was only reading a plot guide after watching the film that I realised I didn't even pick up on the correct identity of the killer, mistaking them for someone else entirely!